


Never

by afterandalasia



Series: Horror Film Responses [3]
Category: Let Her Out (2016)
Genre: Brain Tumours, Character Death Fix, F/F, Fix-It, Hopeful Ending, Medicine, Mental Health Issues, Post-Canon, Pre-Femslash, supportiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 22:03:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16437638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: “And I remember what I said to you.” Molly sits down, drops her bag to the floor, and takes Helen’s hand. Helen’s eyes still bore into hers, desperate and lost. “I love you, Helen, and I’m not gonna leave you again. You’re gonna get better, and I’m gonna be here for you all the way through, and I promise that.”At first, they need the paramedics. But after that, Molly suspects, they're going to need each other.





	Never

**Author's Note:**

> Heyyyyy guess who's been watching questionable horror films on Sky again? Anyway, this particular horror film is from someone who has done a number of body-horror-as-allegory-for-mental-illness ( _Bite_ is another film of his) and while those sort of films normally annoy me, this person is really good at _not_ making it seem like mental illness=monster. The ill characters are always the victims.
> 
> In this case, the character Helen finds out that she has a brain tumour which is an absorbed twin (from vanishing twin syndrome), and that a recent accident is causing it to grow and put pressure on her brain. She has blackouts, hallucinations, injures herself, and kills at least two men who make sexual advances on her. She's convinced that the twin is evil and taking over, and at the end viciously attacks her best friend Molly, who kills her in self-defence.
> 
> This is a pretty simple canon divergence, in which Molly calls for a fucking ambulance before going to find out what's going on at the end, because _seriously_ , dude. Otherwise I enjoyed this movie, but the lack of turning to medical professionals after the first diagnosis bewildered me.

 

When the paramedics burst in, Helen’s hands are still wrapped around her throat. It takes both of them to restrain Helen, still screaming, high-pitched and ringing and ringing and ringing in the tiny bathroom. They call for back-up, as Molly sobs, curled up in the bathroom and streaked with Helen’s blood as Helen howls like an animal and thrashes in her grasp.

Only when the second paramedic team turns up does one of them manage to help her out of the bathroom, shuffle her out of the front door of the motel to sit in the back of one of the ambulances.

She can still hear Helen screaming.

“Molly,” says the paramedic. She looks at him so hard that he fills her vision. Each breath tastes like copper and salt, and feels like fire in her throat. Her ribs ache. But she can barely hear him beneath the terrible wonder of breathing at all. “Molly, can you hear me?”

All she can manage is a nod.

“You did the right thing in calling us. We’re going to make sure that your friend is okay.” He holds up the pill bottle, streaked with blood as well, dark in his blue-gloved hands. “Did she take some of these?”

Another nod. He probably knows how much it hurts, she thinks, as he nods and sets aside the bottle and pulls down an oxygen mask for her. She grabs it greedily, even if the cool air almost hurts itself as she gasps it in.

The phone had been hard to hold in her sweaty hand, but she had babbled to the emergency services all the same as she had ridden out here. That her friend was at the motel, she had a brain tumour, she was having blackouts, she was only dangerous to herself but Molly was scared all the same.

She realises that one of her hands is still clutching his bright jacket, so hard that she is shaking. Tears burn in her eyes and roll down her cheeks, and everywhere she looks she is leaving streaks of blood from her touch.

Helen’s blood.

 _God_ , what had that brain tumour done to her? At first it had seemed like drunken blackouts, more irritating than confusing, but then she had gone missing for hours on end, the screaming in the night had started, the people around them going missing.

When Molly had tried to talk to her, the flash of inhumanity in Helen’s eyes. Helen’s hands around Molly’s neck on their living room floor.

Helen’s hands scouring lines into her own flesh, blood on blood, her arms, her shoulders, her neck.

Hands around Molly’s neck again, this time slick with blood. She wonders whether the blood saved her, made it too difficult for Helen to get a grip, and gags.

“Hey there, careful,” says the paramedic. He puts his free hand on her back and leans her forward slightly, apparently unconcerned by the sharp-edged keening sobs that she can now hear in her own breath. She had thought it was just the ringing in her ears. “If you’re going to be sick, don’t worry, go ahead. Let it out.”

She simply begins to cry in earnest, wracking sobs that make her chest throb and her throat burn but she cannot stop them, cannot even think, as he wraps her in a blanket and he does not even listen to his words beyond the soothing sound of his voice.

 

 

 

 

 

Her throat will be fine. The bruises on her body will fade. Her nightmares only wake her up, they do not steal hours away from her.

All they will tell her is that Helen is being held in the hospital until her operation. Even when she tries to explain that Helen has no family, no next of kin, that Molly is the closest thing she has ever had, they will not let her know more.

She finds out bits and pieces afterwards. Helen sobbed that she killed people, but they are traced – alive and well, or at least well enough beyond being frightened by her outbursts of rage at them. The deaths were in Helen’s head, and given the circumstances no charges are pressed.

It isn’t until after the operation that she is allowed to see Helen again. Helen is still handcuffed to the bed, head shaved and with a large bandage over it, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed.

Molly brings two bottles of mocktail mojitos, and the most hideous blonde curly wig that she can find. It’s the sort of thing they would have laughed about, before.

She also brings a silk scarf, and carefully arranges it around her neck to hide the bruises that linger there. There’ll be no hiding the roughness in her voice, but at least it just sounds like she was on a bender last night.

Even the doctors say that they don’t know how much Helen remembers.

“Hey,” says Molly, closing the door behind her. Helen’s eyes fix on her, so she pulls the mocktails out of her bag. “They said no to the alcohol, but I found a workaround.”

“Why did you come?” says Helen. Her voice trembles, and her fingers twitch. God knows how they managed to get a handcuff around the new cast on her left arm.

“I told you that I wasn’t going to leave you again, and I’m not.” It had taken her too long to realise that her fear had only made her push Helen further away. Molly hooks a chair with her foot to drag it closer to the bed.

“But I remember what I did to you.”

And Helen’s neck still throbs. But she remembers the terror in Molly’s voice when she’d said that her sister was in her head, remembers how it had been Molly’s blood that covered them both.

“And I remember what I said to you.” She sits down, drops her bag to the floor, and takes Helen’s hand. Helen’s eyes still bore into hers, desperate and lost. “I love you, Helen, and I’m not gonna leave you again. You’re gonna get better, and I’m gonna be here for you all the way through, and I promise that.”

They’ll sort out what’s real and what’s fake, and get Helen back in control of her own head, and that’s all that matters. Molly wonders how she’s been so blind for so long.

Tears shine in Helen’s eyes, and her voice drops to a whisper. “What if she comes back?”

“She won’t come back. She’s gone.” Later, they can worry about sorting out the real and fake from that, as well. Fucking car crash, fucking tumour. It’s bad enough trying to put back the pieces of one drunken night, and Helen has lost most of a week. Lost it to blood and tears and nightmares, and the dressing over her head is nothing compare to the others that peek out beneath her hospital gown. For now, Molly just wants her to feel safe. “She’s never coming back again.”

Helen starts to cry, but relief rings in her sobs. Molly rises, and holds her, and presses a kiss to her shaved temple.

“She’s never coming back again.”


End file.
